It remains a mystery as to the nature of the evidence or reasons underlying James Lovelock's statement that he was 'alarmist' about climate change. Unfortunately, these statements are inconsistent with up-to-date climate data sets

“It is unthinkable that that a civilization which placed a man on the moon and explored the solar system cannot find the will to protect its own planet. No human tribal, national, religious faith or political system appears to be able to resolve the climate crisis, nor can the rationale of ongoing $trillions-scale wars around the globe, which can only culminate in nuclear war, amount to more than a suicide pact.”

Scientists have been saying for a while that we have until between 2015 and 2020 to start radically reducing our carbon emissions, and what do you know: That deadline’s almost past! Crazy how these things sneak up on you while you’re squabbling about whether global warming is a religion. Also, our science got better in the meantime, so now we know that no matter what we do, we can say adios to the planet’s ice caps

One claim frequently heard regarding extreme heat waves goes something like this: ”Since this heat wave broke the previous record by 5 °C, global warming can’t have much to do with it since that has been only 1 °C over the 20th century”. Here we explain why we find this logic doubly flawed

Top climate scientist James Hansen tells the story of his involvement in the science of and debate over global climate change. In doing so he outlines the overwhelming evidence that change is happening and why that makes him deeply worried about the future

If you want to get serious about climate change, really serious, in line with the science, and you want to meet targets like 80 percent emissions cuts by midcentury in the developed world, then you need to be intervening strongly in the economy, and you can’t do it all with carbon markets and offsetting. You have to really seriously regulate corporations and invest in the public sector

According to UNC Chapel Hill researchers who just crunched 10 years’ worth of data, climate change is throwing bird migration patterns just a tiny bit off-kilter — and that small disruption could have major effects on the health of bird populations

The world’s oceans may be turning acidic faster today from human carbon emissions than they did during four major extinctions in the last 300 million years, when natural pulses of carbon sent global temperatures soaring, says a new study in Science. The study is the first of its kind to survey the geologic record for evidence of ocean acidification over this vast time period

Boom Goes The Reef
Australia's coal export boom and the industrialisation of the Great Barrier Reef.

Australia is on the verge of an unprecedented coal boom. The epicentre of this expansion is the yet to be developed Galilee Basin in Central Queensland. Galilee is the proposed site for a series of mega mines that will cause Australia’s coal exports to more than double within a decade. The creation of mega mines in Central Queensland, the accompanying export infrastructure and increases in shipping traffic, as well as the burning of the coal they produce, place an incredible burden on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef

The total global ice mass lost from Greenland, Antarctica and Earth’s glaciers and ice caps during the study period was about 4.3 trillion tons (1,000 cubic miles), adding about 0.5 inches (12 millimeters) to global sea level. That’s enough ice to cover the United States 1.5 feet (0.5 meters) deep

Novaya Zemlya, the large Russian island that divides the Barents and Kara seas, is completely ice-free. The same almost goes for Svalbard. It’s safe to safe that this is unprecedented ever since satellites started monitoring Arctic sea ice in 1979. Has the melt season started in the Barents and Kara Seas two months earlier than normal?

Imagine you’re a middle-school science teacher, and you get to the section of the course where you’re to talk about climate change. You mention the “C” words, and two students walk out of the class. Or you mention global warming and a hand shoots up. “Mrs. Brown! My dad says global warming is a hoax!” What should you do?

Rick Santorum, who surged at the last minute to give Mitt Romney a real run for his money in Tuesday's Iowa caucuses, is less green than his rival, and decidedly nuttier when it comes to climate change. But let's not split hairs here. Both men will staunchly defend fossil fuels, and neither is likely to do much of anything to fight global warming

New research into the Earth's paleoclimate history by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies director James Hansen suggests the potential for rapid climate changes this century, including multiple meters of sea level rise, if global warming is not abated

In 2020 a new legal instrument will come into effect that will replace the Kyoto Protocol and will seriously impact the principles of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The result will be the deepening of the “Laisser Faire, laisser passer” regime inaugurated in Copenhagen, Cancun and Durban which will lead to an increase in temperature of more than 4°C

Scientists who track methane in the atmosphere in the Arctic and elsewhere around the planet see no big surge that can be pinned on such releases. Based on what we see in the atmosphere, there is no evidence of substantial increases in methane emissions from the Arctic in the past 20 years

Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane – a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide – have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region. The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern Russia for nearly 20 years

Climate scientists are advising us insistently: the world just has a few years to start acting on climate change, if not we may enter in an irreversible spiral of climate disaster. So the most urgent issue is to start acting NOW on real mitigation. Unfortunately, the Durban package doesn’t attend this at all. During the whole Durban negotiation, there hasn’t even been a real discussion on the issue

Vulnerable countries of the Global South have no other option than to join the choir of Canadian indigenous people and environmentalists who warn that any extraction of tar sands oil is off limits, i.e. should be stopped

The "remarkable" "landmark" agreement is less than meets the eye. The world is still on course to 4 degrees C (7.2 degrees F) and higher, i.e., disaster. Nonetheless, there has been an important shift in climate geopolitics

Over the next decade we all have a lot of work to do; both in terms of designing the new system and getting on with the all-important business of real-world mitigation. Durban delivered that mandate, and there is no time to lose on implementing it

The world's oceans are faced with an unprecedented loss of species comparable to the great mass extinctions of prehistory, according to the report, from a panel of leading marine scientists brought together in Oxford earlier this year by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)

The ocean is a living system that makes our lives possible. Even if you never see the ocean, your life depends on its existence. With every breath you take, every drop of water you drink, you are connected to the sea

For all of the points raised in the report, this isn’t a question of ‘conservation for conservation’s sake’, but a fundamental necessity for the continued provision of vital life support for the population, of human and other living beings, that inhabit our ‘blue planet’. The oceans may have already passed breaking point; if that’s the case, we would never know – with scientific precision – until it is too late

One of the thorniest questions facing climate scientists is whether human-induced climate change is leading to more heat waves, floods, and extreme weather events. Now, employing increasingly sophisticated methods of studying weather extremes, climatologists say they are closer to answering that key question

In contrast to the impression of gradual climate projections which may be obtained by IPCC projections (Figure 1), the spate of heat waves/fire, hurricanes and floods around the world, which doubled in frequency between 1980 and 2009 , manifests the response of the atmosphere-ocean system to increased radiative forcing by anthropogenic greenhouse gas, namely the over 320 billion tons carbon (GtC) emitted since the 18th century, more than 50 percent the original inventory of the atmosphere

Thawing permafrost is threatening to overwhelm attempts to keep the planet from getting too hot for human survival. Without major reductions in the use of fossil fuels, as much as two-thirds of the world's gigantic storehouse of frozen carbon could be released, a new study reported. That would push global temperatures several degrees higher, making large parts of the planet uninhabitable

The release to the atmosphere and oceans of hundreds of billions of tons of carbon from fossil biospheres, at the rate of >2 ppm CO2 per year, is unprecedented in geological history of Earth, excepting events such as asteroid impacts which excavated and vaporized carbon-rich sediments, interfering with the carbon and oxygen cycles, which led to mass extinction of species

The release to the atmosphere and oceans of hundreds of billions of tons of carbon from fossil biospheres, at the rate of >2 ppm CO2 per year, is unprecedented in geological history of Earth, excepting events such as asteroid impacts which excavated and vaporized carbon-rich sediments, interfering with the carbon and oxygen cycles, which led to mass extinction of species

Forecasting what the Earth’s climate might look like a century from now has long presented a huge challenge to climate scientists. But better understanding of the climate system, improved observations of the current climate, and rapidly improving computing power are slowly leading to more reliable methods

Researchers disagree about what the economic costs of climate change will be over the coming decades. But the answer to that question is fundamental in deciding how urgent it is to take action to reduce emissions

The US study predicted that if society continues burning fossil fuels at the current rate, atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide could rise from the current level of 390 parts per million (ppm) to 1,000 by the end of this century. The last time the world had such high levels of carbon dioxide temperatures were on average 29F(16C) above pre-industrial levels. Evidence has been found of crocodiles and palm trees at the Poles and only small mammals were able to survive

While it is no longer surprising, it remains disheartening to see a blistering attack on climate science in the business press where thoughtful reviews of climate policy ought to be appearing. Of course, the underlying strategy is to pretend that no evidence that the climate is changing exists, so any effort to address climate change is a waste of resources

The overall warming of Earth's northern half could result in cold winters, new research shows. The shrinking of sea-ice in the eastern Arctic causes some regional heating of the lower levels of air -- which may lead to strong anomalies in atmospheric airstreams, triggering an overall cooling of the northern continents, according to a study recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research

Is our addiction to petroleum going to drive us Americans to deprive an ancient Native culture of North America, the Iñupiat, of their heart and soul? Are our Suburbans, our Yukons and our Hummers going to demand it? Our addiction has consequences

Patrick Bond, author of Climate Change, Carbon Trading and Civil Society: Negative Returns on South African Investments and director of the University of KwaZulu-Natal Center for Civil Society, assesses the outcome of the United Nations climate summit

Bolivia's indefatigable negotiator, Pablo Solon, put it most cogently in the concluding plenary, when he said that the only way to assess whether the agreement had any 'clothes' was to see if it included firm commitments to reduce emissions and whether it was enough to prevent catastrophic climate change

It sounds good enough, but is it good enough? It seems to me, far from Cancún, after looking at various reports on the conference , that the U.N. process was being cheered more than actual climate protection progress. I do not have much faith in agreements or intentions when corporatism and consumerism still rule

The Plurinational State of Bolivia believes that the Cancun text is a hollow and false victory that was imposed without consensus, and its cost will be measured in human lives. History will judge harshly

In an op-ed, "Chinese Leadership Needed to Save Humanity," published in the South China Morning Post on November 3, I argue that China should impose a rising fee (tax) on carbon, for China's own sake and for the future of humanity

Critical negotiations are under way here in Cancun, under the auspices of the United Nations, to reverse human-induced global warming. This is the first major meeting since the failed Copenhagen summit last year. As we have just learned with the release of classified diplomatic cables from WikiLeaks, the United States, the largest polluter in the history of the planet, is engaged in what one journalist here called “a very, very dirty business.”

Concern for high-mountain regions of the world is rising, according to a new report released by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) today, which states that the Himalayas and many other glaciers are melting quickly, threatening lives by flooding, and by reducing the region’s freshwater supply

The US mid–term elections brought the global climate campaign to its knees, but as November drew to a close we in Australia got the most promising signal for a long time that our own national leadership is beginning to take climate policy seriously. Is this real hope, or just clutching at straws as we sink into a bottomless quagmire?

The fringes of the coldest continent are starting to feel the heat, with the northern Antarctic Peninsula warming faster than virtually any place on Earth. These rapidly rising temperatures represent the first breach in the enormous frozen dome that holds 90 percent of the world’s ice

In 2008, a small Inupiat village in Alaska sued ExxonMobil and 23 other fossil fuel companies including Peabody Energy and BP for contributing to the destruction of their homeland, and charged a smaller subset with deliberately creating a false debate around climate change science. You might have heard of the lawsuit—Kivalina v. ExxonMobil et al. The suit was framed by some as a David and Goliath story, with people wondering if it would be the first successful climate change claim

In our lifetimes, it will never be too late to fight global warming. Every degree will matter. Over the coming years and decades, there will be no better fight, no victory that will more enrich the lives of countless human generations to follow, than to stabilize the climate

We can't fool Mother Nature at any time. She's not fooled by trendy green euphemisms or oxymorons. Call it economic development or sustainable development, but she has only one word for it---growth. All human activity is subject to her objective measure, and it will be registered as having an impact

Children today are likely to reach old age in a world that is 4C warmer, where the 10,000-year certainties of the global climate can no longer be relied on, and widespread crop failures, drought, flooding and mass migration of the dispossessed become a part of everyday life

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) COP16 opens this week in Cancún, Mexico to discuss green business (November 29 – December 10, 2010). No one is expecting any global climate treaty to be signed at this conference. However there is hope that some progress could be made

The world is now firmly on the path for dangerous climate change in the coming century, a major new assessment reveals today on the eve of the forthcoming UN climate conference which opens next week in Mexico

Soon I’ll will tell you about five Godzilla–scale fossil–digging projects in North America that if approved will set us on a course to repeat our past with grave implications for the future of our planet. You may have already heard about some of these projects individually, but the urgency to stop them collectively is more than ever before

Climate change is but one of the global scale 'Bottleneck' problems threatening our continuing evolution. A science-process, controlled-access wiki could be a key tool in looking down the road, quantifying dangers, and acting with due diligence to future generations

This post examines the question of whether some US companies are guilty of a new kind of crime against humanity that the world has yet to classify. This post is not meant to be a polemic but a call for serious engaged reflection about deeply irresponsible corporate-sponsored programs that have potentially profound harsh effects upon tens of millions of people living around the world, countless millions of future generations, and the ecological systems on which life depends. This post seeks to encourage further reflection on the issues discussed here

When we think of wars in our times, our minds turn to Iraq and Afghanistan. But the bigger war is the war against the planet. This war has its roots in an economy that fails to respect ecological and ethical limits - limits to inequality, limits to injustice, limits to greed and economic concentration

Delegates to the world summit on biodiversity here are calling for a moratorium on climate engineering research, like the idea of putting huge mirrors in outer space to reflect some of the sun's heating rays away from the planet

This is the first of two or more articles on the extensive tree mortality now being caused by bark beetles in western North America. The goal of this first post is simply to provide necessary background on the relevant biological/ecological processes involved, so that future articles discussing climatic and other possible influences, are more understandable

The Moscow Forum on the Arctic seemed a rather surrealistic event. For the Arctic circle is the very region where the drama of the world’s climate catastrophe threatens being enacted. Two of the natural phenomena which scientists describe when speaking of ‘tipping points‘, of natural changes that in the future will speed up the pace of climate change, occur in the Arctic circle and its surroundings

As climate science advances, predictions about the extent of future warming and its effects are likely to become less — not more — precise. That may make it more difficult to convince the public of the reality of climate change, but it hardly diminishes the urgency of taking action

Climate-vulnerable developing nations could use international law to break the current deadlock in the intergovernmental negotiations on climate change by taking industrialised nations to court, says a paper published on 4th Octoberby the Foundation for International Environmental Law and Development

Even making one’s way just up to Base Camp, which lies at an altitude of 5,380 metres, can already give one the dismal view of the devastation climate change is wreaking. Snow cover in the mountains is decreasing, crevasses are opening up in the glaciers. Avalanches (have been) occurring frequently (in) the past two years

India's environment minister said on Monday the country could not have high economic growth and a rapid rise in carbon emissions now that the nation was the number three emitter after China and the United States

Here are three stories about young people with a different perspective -- a teen rock band called One Eyed Rhyno from Sacramento, California; climate students from the North Cascades Institute in Sedrow-Woolley, Washington; and a bicyclist from the Yukon province in Canada

While we may not be able to stop various catastrophes and collapse-processes from occurring, we still retain an unprecedented opportunity to envisage an alternative vision for a new, sustainable and equitable form of post-carbon civilization.The imperative now is for communities, activists, scholars and policymakers to initiate dialogue on the contours of this vision, and pathways to it

While political forces have conspired to make the Zapatistas largely invisible both inside Mexico and internationally, their challenge has always been to propose a paradigm of development that is both just and self-sustaining. It seems fair, then, to see if Zapatismo can shed any light on the muddle of politics around the climate crisis. Can the poetic riddles of Zapatista spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos serve as signposts on the rough road toward just climate solutions?

The carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels have melted the Arctic sea ice to its lowest volume since before the rise of human civilisation, dangerously upsetting the energy balance of the entire planet, climate scientists are reporting

We have the expertise and technology to quantify how our actions today endanger future generations in a transparent and much more informing process - to do due diligence to future generations - but such a process would require present actors including governments and business to engage and supply relevant information and this is not in the present best interest of key actors and so we stay in default mode with only limitedly informed, speculative planning and little action. How evil is that? How stupid in the Age of Stupid?

Wake Up, Freak Out - then Get a Grip is a short, animated film about climate change by Leo Murray. It tells we are now dangerously close to the tipping point in the world's climate system; this is the point of no return, after which truly catastrophic changes become inevitable

Consistent with widespread media reports of extreme heat and adverse impacts in various places, the latest results from ERA-Interim indicate that the average temperature over land areas of the extratropical northern hemisphere reached a new high in July 2010. May and June 2010 were also unusually warm

We must acknowledge that our youth will have to deal with climate crimes (I’ve been framing the climate events as crimes and will write more on that topic in future stories) much more than what we're dealing with today. We must put in place the educational system now, so that today’s youth will be better equipped to fight for a liveable planet for themselves and for all other species with whom they’ll share this earth

ClimateStoryTellers.org, a gathering place for stories on all things global warming has just been launched. We have wonderful activist groups like 350.org and others, we have great sites like Grist, ENN, and others for environmental news and opinions, no one place dedicated to climate stories. The objective is not to present just a story as a short news or opinion, but "in-depth", which means all stories will have a central focus perhaps a local issue, but it'll also explore the issues connection to regional, national and global relevance

Global warming is a crisis: for all lands, for all oceans, for all rivers, for all forests, for all humans, for all birds, for all mammals, for all little creatures that we don’t see... for all life. We need stories and actions from every part of our earth. So far, global warming communications have primarily focused on scientific information. I strongly believe that to engage the public, we need all fields of the humanities. It is to this end that I founded ClimateStoryTellers.org

Analysts have been warning for several years that the impacts of climate change directly relate to the national security of the U.S. and other countries, but the link has never been so clear as it is today in northwest Pakistan

Robert H. Byrne of the University of South Florida has shown that in just the past 15 years, acidity has increased 6 percent in the upper 100 meters of the Pacific Ocean from Hawaii to Alaska. Across the planet, the average pH of the ocean’s surface layer has declined 0.12 unit, to approximately 8.1, since the beginning of the industrial revolution.It equates to a 30 percent increase in acidity. Values of pH measure hydrogen ions (H+) in solution

2010 is becoming the year of the heatwave, with record temperatures set in 17 countries. Record highs have occurred in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine – the three nations at the centre of the eastern European heatwave which has lasted for more than three weeks – but also African, Middle Eastern and Latin American countries

Global warming is not a standalone issue. At the same time as we are trying to decarbonize our entire society and cope with the erratic weather events of early climate change, we are simultaneously being hit with peak oil and economic contraction

Heavy smoke caused by burning wildfires continues to blanket Moscow, forcing the city’s 11 million residents to don facemasks and cover windows with wet cloths in an effort to protect their lungs from the polluted air. The death rate in Russia’s capital nearly doubled in July, reported Chief of the Moscow Health Department Andrei Seltsovskii on Monday, with the city’s morgues close to full capacity. “On normal days, between 360 and 380 die. Now it’s around 700,” explained Seltsovskii.

Until recently, many reports said global warming would be good for Russia, because the warmer climate would improve their agriculture. In 2010 the fields of burnt wheat disproved that theory. Who knew it would come down this way? That collapse would envelop us and we would still be, collectively speaking, as generally unaware of our peril as sheep being herded into the slaughter pen?

For those alive today, we may be faced with something akin to dealing with a chronic disease. Fortunately, unlike actions aimed at prevention, there is no expiration date on our task. If we are at the end of prevention, then we might be fated simply to cope with the intractable problems of climate change and declining energy and resources

According to UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres, governments meeting at the UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn (2 to 6 August) have made progress towards deciding the shape of a successful result at the November/December UN Climate Change Conference in Mexico, but now need to narrow down the many options for action on climate change presently under negotiation

As warming intensifies, scientists warn, the oxygen content of oceans across the planet could be more and more diminished, with serious consequences for the future of fish and other sea life. In some places, the oxygen is getting so scarce that fish and other animals cannot survive. They can either leave the oxygen-free waters or die. The Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium reported this week that this year’s so-called “dead zone” covers 7,722 square miles

An astonishing 40% of ocean's phytoplankton population has disappeared since 1950! The fewer microscopic plants there are living in the ocean surface waters, the less CO2 is drawn down from the atmosphere. Thus, the Earth's carbon cycle is being fundamentally altered, with uncertain but surely deleterious effects

Global warming is turning 35! Not only has the current spate of global warming been going on for about 35 years now, but also the term “global warming” will have its 35th anniversary next week. On 8 August 1975, Wally Broecker published his paper “Are we on the brink of a pronounced global warming?” in the journal Science. That appears to be the first use of the term “global warming” in the scientific literature

This article is the first part of a three-part series, which considers the effect of global warming on ocean level rise, and examines life with constantly advancing seas from two perspectives: that of the landlubber and that of the seafarer

Obama’s legacy — and indeed the legacy of all 21st century presidents, starting with George W. Bush — will be determined primarily by whether we avert catastrophic climate change. If not, then Obama — and all of us — will be seen as a failure, and rightfully so

A powerful group of scientists, venture capitalists and conservative think tanks is coalescing around the idea of reproducing cooling effect by injecting sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere to counter climate change. Despite the enormity of what is being proposed - nothing less than seizing control of the climate - the public has been almost entirely excluded from the planning

Last month’s combined global land and ocean surface temperature made it the warmest June on record and the warmest on record averaged for any April-June and January-June periods, according to NOAA. Worldwide average land surface temperature was the warmest on record for June and the April-June period, and the second warmest on record for the year-to-date (January-June) period, behind 2007

We sit passive and dumb as corporations and the leaders of industrialized nations ensure that climate change will accelerate to levels that could mean the extinction of our species. Homo sapiens, as the biologist Tim Flannery points out, are the "future-eaters."

This widespread denial keeps us telling ourselves carbon addict lies like putting a price on carbon or growing a green economy or clean coal or saving the planet by being a smart shopper as climate change solutions. For convenience I'll label this form of denial Insidious Climate Change Denial or ICCD

It’s time for each of us to have a talk with our inner economist. If humanity is to survive the hardships that lie ahead due to climate change, we’ve got to abandon the now universal, but originally Western, ethos of economic growth. If we don’t abandon those notions and change the way our societies operate, we may face utter collapse. So argues veteran environmental journalist Dianne Dumanoski in The End of the Long Summer: Why We Must Remake Our Civilization to Survive on a Volatile Earth

I attended the alternative Climate Conference in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba as part of an eight-person Quebec activist delegation. I came back convinced that we witnessed a turning point in the global Climate Justice movement

I just find the sociocultural (and academic) interaction between peak oilers and climate types fascinating. You'd think it would be a natural alliance, but in practice it seems to tend more toward mutual disinterest or even hostility. What's up with that?

No matter how dark the future looks from here, we cannot know what is really going to happen. Whatever you do, don't worry; it eats the spirit and diminishes our capacity to stretch and grow and live well. Bobby McFerrin was right; worry is wasteful, so don't worry, but do act and be happy. Let each of us live so that our lives are a light to the world and let us offer our loving service with a smile

By meeting our most essential needs closer to home our communities will be more resilient in the face of global economic and ecological shocks. Being more self-sufficient means we will be less dependent upon centralized, energy-intensive industrial infrastructure and energy-devouring long-distance transport

A number of commenters to my previous post argued that I'm being unfair to Earth Day - of course, there's greenwashing. of course people are cashing in, but underlying the greenwashing, there's something good and serious and worthwhile there and I'm being churlish to deny it

Bolivian President Evo Morales said capitalism is to blame for global warming and the accelerated deterioration of the planetary ecosystem in a speech today opening an international conference on climate change and the "rights of Mother Earth."

At the People's World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, the consistent message is ecological, indigenous, communitarian and anti-corporate. The great majority of speakers sound radical and have the support of the thousands of attendees. The message is welcome at the top, in the person of Evo Morales, the indigenous Aymara former farmer and union organizer who is Bolivia's president

Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. It has taken capitalism about 250 years to generate enough waste and pollution to press dangerously against nature’s limits. With such a damning record, there should be no grounds to expect a different outcome in the future. Yet the mainstream discussion about how to tackle the climate crisis still assumes that, this time around, capitalism can be made sustainable

The fight against climate change has begun to reflect the colonial, top-down worldview that contributed to the problem in the first place. Mexican activist and storyteller Gustavo Esteva on a new vision—one that is radically bottom-up

To fight climate change the media should be reconsidering the entire business model. Those who are sincere in wanting to educate, engage and influence the public sphere need to first liberate themselves as far as possible from the controlling grip of corporations. Only then will they be able help us to act upon the challenges facing our world as a result of man-made environmental disasters

President Barack Obama's offshore drilling announcement is bad news for efforts to stop runaway climate change, especially following December's failed climate talks in Copenhagen. But there is hope — and a whole new approach — coming from an unusual gathering later this month. Representatives of 50 governments will meet with ordinary people and social movement leaders from around the world in Cochabamba, Bolivia, to work on solutions to what may be the biggest threat ever faced by humankind

Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change from radically impacting on our lives over the coming decades. This is the stark conclusion of James Lovelock, the globally respected environmental thinker and independent scientist who developed the Gaia theory

Humans have wrought such vast and unprecedented changes on the planet that we may be ushering in a new period of geological history. The new epoch, called the Anthropocene - meaning new man - would be the first period of geological time shaped by the action of a single species. It is feared that the damage mankind has inflicted will lead to the sixth largest mass extinction in Earth's history with thousands of plants and animals being wiped out

Earlier this week, Greenpeace did the rational world a huge favor by compiling a great overview of the denial industry. “Dealing in Doubt: The Climate Denial Industry and Climate Science” is a brief but critical summary of the attacks on climate science, scientists and, most notably, the IPCC

A tiny island claimed for nearly 30 years by India and Bangladesh in the Bay of Bengal has disappeared beneath the rising seas. What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking, has been resolved by global warming

The UN called in the world's top scientists today to review a report by its climate body, four months after public confidence in the science of global warming was shaken by the discovery of a mistake about the melting rates of Himalayan glaciers

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced an important new climate change financing group last week, but out of the 19 people named, no women were included. This is unfortunate because women will bear the brunt of the effects of climate change and are key to any climate solutions

Methane is like the radical wing of the carbon cycle, in today’s atmosphere a stronger greenhouse gas per molecule than CO2, and an atmospheric concentration that can change more quickly than CO2 can. There has been a lot of press coverage of a new paper in Science this week called “Extensive methane venting to the atmosphere from sediments of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf”, which comes on the heels of a handful of interrelated methane papers in the last year or so. Is now the time to get frightened?

What would constitute a due diligence process for quantifying climate change dangers, local and global, immediate and for the future? Is our present way of doing climate change science the best way of quantifying the climate change dangers?

A critical Marxist approach, especially in our time, requires an ecological worldview, while a critical human ecology requires an anti-capitalist and ultimately socialist orientation (i.e., a Marxist one). In terms of united work that Marxists and ecologists can share, social justice and environmental sustainability: saving humanity and saving the earth. You can't expect to achieve one without the other, and neither is possible under the existing system

As signs of climate instability increase, radical and rapid action is becoming ever more urgent. One of the biggest obstacles to global collaboration, however, has been the foot-dragging and obstructionism of the US government, much of it based on the fear of giving Southern economies a ‘competitive advantage’ if they are permitted to emit greenhouse gases at higher rates than the North. Yet even within the environmental movement there is no unanimity on this thorny question: should the countries of the South have the right to increase their emissions as they industrialize and ‘develop’?

An iceberg the size of Luxembourg has broken away from the Antarctic continent and is drifting towards an area of the Southern Ocean that plays a critical role in driving the world's ocean circulation – the global "conveyor belt" of circulating sea water

Now that Chile has just been visited by a huge quake, the world has good cause to harbor grave apprehensions over a situation where no region is spared good grounds to fear the consequences of such phenomena. The second segment of this research document identifies Mexico as an environmentally-induced migration ‘hotspot,’ discusses development impacts in Latin America, and speculates on potential responses from Washington

Relegated to less productive lands, small farmers in Latin America face undeniable economic hardships as their produce customarily has to compete against strongly subsidized American and European agricultural goods. The migratory pressures already in place due to these hardships will most likely be cemented by climate change, and the inequality in land distribution only further underscores the disproportionate influence it is bound to have on the poorer sectors of Latin American society

Atmospheric levels of methane, the greenhouse gas which is much more powerful than carbon dioxide, have risen significantly for the last three years running, scientists will disclose today – leading to fears that a major global-warming "feedback" is beginning to kick in

Clive Hamilton tracks the progress of climate denialism in Australia. He reveals how it works, who organizes it, where the raw material that fuels it come from, how popular perceptions are diverging from scientific facts, and what the effects are on politics and public debate. He begins by exposing an ugly campaign of cyber-bullying directed at leading scientists

The release of more than 370 billion tons of carbon (GtC) from buried early biospheres, adding more than one half of the original carbon inventory of the atmosphere (~590 GtC), as well as the depletion of vegetation, have triggered a fundamental shift in the state of the atmosphere

Since the emails were released, and despite the fact that there is no evidence within them to support any of these claims of fraud and fabrication, the UK media has opened itself so wide to the spectrum of thought on climate that the GW hoaxers have now suddenly find themselves well within the mainstream. Nothing has changed the self-evidently ridiculousness of their arguments, but their presence at the media table has meant that the more reasonable critics seem far more centrist than they did a few months ago

Currently, a few errors –and supposed errors– in the last IPCC report (“AR4″) are making the media rounds – together with a lot of distortion and professional spin by parties interested in discrediting climate science. Time for us to sort the wheat from the chaff: which of these putative errors are real, and which not? And what does it all mean, for the IPCC in particular, and for climate science more broadly?

Is it hopeless? Apparently so if we are going to be dependent on the governments and the corporations. Yet in taking that position, we are putting aside an "inconvenient truth" - inconvenient because we might rather put responsibility on irresistible forces out there in the universe than on ourselves

Most of all those who criticise the IPCC ignore the fact that, to date, the IPCC reports have UNDERESTIMATED ice melt rates, sea level rise, feedback effects and the proximity of tipping points, not least the looming release of hundreds of GtC as methane from permafrost, lake sediments and bogs

The roof of the world is heating up, according to a report today that said temperatures in Tibet soared last year to the highest level since records began. Adding to the fierce international debate about the impact of climate change on the Himalayas, the state-run China Daily noted that the average temperature in Tibet in 2009 was 5.9C, 1.5 degrees higher than "normal"

The single most important cause of global warming—the urbanization of humanity—is also potentially the principal solution to the problem of human survival in the later twenty-first century. Left to the dismal politics of the present, of course, cities of poverty will almost certainly become the coffins of hope; but all the more reason that we must start thinking like Noah. Since most of history’s giant trees have already been cut down, a new Ark will have to be constructed out of the materials that a desperate humanity finds at hand in insurgent communities, pirate technologies, bootlegged media, rebel science and forgotten utopias

A huge furore has erupted over whether the Himalayan glaciers are melting or not. Here is a rebuttal by Syed Iqbal Hasnain one of India’s foremost glaciologists from TERI who is now at the heart of the controversy

The past decade was the warmest ever on Earth, a new analysis of global surface temperatures released by NASA showed Thursday. The US space agency also found that 2009 was the second-warmest year on record since modern temperature measurements began in 1880. Last year was only a small fraction of a degree cooler than 2005, the warmest yet, putting 2009 in a virtual tie with the other hottest years, which have all occurred since 1998

Climate science has suffered another blow to its credibility after it was revealed that a claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that Himalayan glaciers will probably disappear altogether in the next 25 years was wrong. It is only a matter of time before the lobbyists who peddle climate change denial for their own political ends start to overstate the significance of this episode

Australia leads the world in condemnation of the annual killing of 1,000 whales by the Japanese. However Australia is the world’s worst annual per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) polluter and man-made global warming with consequent loss of Antarctic sea ice is a major threat to declining krill stocks and hence to the whales that feed on krill

The past year, 2009, tied as the second warmest year in the 130 years of global instrumental temperature records, in the surface temperature analysis of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). The Southern Hemisphere set a record as the warmest year for that half of the world. Global mean temperature, as shown in Figure 1a, was 0.57°C (1.0°F) warmer than climatology (the 1951-1980 base period). Southern Hemisphere mean temperature, as shown in Figure 1b, was 0.49°C (0.88°F) warmer than in the period of climatology

Confusion over the means and ends of radical left activism can be potentially fatal for the causes we strive to advance. And for the case of climate change mitigation, confusion can be fatal, literally speaking, for the human species. Given the potential opportunity to enact binding reductions in carbon emissions at the Conference of Parties to the Kyoto Protocol in Mexico next year, any confusion that plagues the Left must be lay to rest immediately in order to ensure we play our indispensable role in combating this threat

Copenhagen was a watershed event. Climate change has become, in many people's minds, the central survival issue for our species, and the Copenhagen talks provided a pivotal moment for addressing that issue. The fact that the talks failed to produce a binding agreement is therefore of some significance

What trends are likely the next ten years? One thing for sure, 2010 through 2019 will be one day looked at as 1.) the turning point for addressing climate change by using effective urban management strategies, or it will be remembered as 2.) the time when we collectively fumbled the Big Blue Ball

Despite the epic failure of the UN climate summit in Copenhagen, I think there are plenty of reasons to be hopeful that 2010 will be a banner year for achieving new and lasting environmental protection. Here are the top 5 reasons why

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